How Building a Caravan Booking Platform Made Me a Better Architect

When I joined Holiday Caravans Direct (HCD), I didn’t expect the experience would shape the core of how I think about software architecture today. At the time, I was simply taking on a project — a full rewrite and evolution of an existing caravan rental business. But what started as a development job quickly became an exercise in end-to-end architecture, business alignment, and technical leadership.

From Full Stack Developer to Everything

The role required more than just writing code. As the sole technical resource, I became the product owner, project manager, developer, DevOps engineer, and technical lead. There was no buffer between me and the stakeholders, which meant I had to translate business goals directly into technical outcomes — often with little time and a lot of ambiguity.

That experience alone gave me a crash course in managing expectations, negotiating requirements, and communicating trade-offs with non-technical clients. It forced me to think not just about features, but about scalability, maintainability, and support. In essence, I was learning architecture through immersion.

Real World Complexity, Real World Solutions

One of the biggest challenges at HCD was designing a booking system that handled a high degree of customisation. Owners needed flexible pricing periods — high, medium, and low season — with the ability to override availability or rates at the day level. On top of that, the platform had to support both online and offline bookings while avoiding double-booking or calendar conflicts.

The result was a calendar system built around a two-step request model: availability and pricing were decoupled, enabling a lighter and more responsive user experience. I built a custom Vue.js calendar component that fetched just what was needed, avoiding heavy server-side rendering.

These constraints taught me to design for performance early, build around clear responsibilities, and use patterns that could evolve with the business. I wasn't just solving coding problems — I was solving architecture problems.

Learning to Architect in Isolation

There were no architects to guide me. No tech leads to review my decisions. Just me, the codebase, and the real-world needs of a growing business. That kind of responsibility forces you to take ownership in a different way.

I learned how to:

• Decouple features from each other for easier maintenance and iteration

• Plan for extensibility even in a single-developer environment

• Wrap legacy systems behind APIs to keep the core product clean

• Keep the customer journey central to all architectural decisions

Why It Matters

Looking back, HCD was the first time I truly owned a system from concept to deployment. I touched every line of code, made every design decision, and saw the business impact of those choices — good and bad.

That kind of experience is rare. It taught me not just how to build software, but how to guide a product from idea to execution with technical foresight. It made me a better architect — not because I had all the answers, but because I had to figure them out.

Today, when I lead teams or define strategies, I still lean on those lessons. I still think about the user, the business, and the bigger picture. And I still build systems like someone who knows what it’s like to be the only one in the room.